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Artist’s Family Says Gallery Ignored Warning of Fakes

A few months after the abstract painter Richard Diebenkorn died in 1993 his family visited Knoedler & Company, the gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that had long been his dealer. His wife, Phyllis; his daughter, Gretchen; and an art scholar went to see two gouache drawings that the gallery had recently acquired and that it hoped to sell as works from Diebenkorn’s celebrated Ocean Park series.

What happened at the meeting nearly two decades ago is now a matter of dispute, one that has only grown in significance as the gallery, once venerable and now closed, battles accusations that it sold many works of modern art that were actually sophisticated forgeries.

The Diebenkorn family says it made it plain that day, before the drawings were sold, that it suspected the drawings were fakes.

“They didn’t look quite right, and we said, ‘The provenance is wacky and the story behind the provenance makes no sense,’ ” said Richard Grant, the artist’s son-in-law and the executive director of the Diebenkorn Foundation.

“We have definitive documentary evidence,” said Nicholas Gravante Jr., Ms. Freedman’s lawyer, including a copy of a 1995 letter from the gallery to the family members “confirming that they had viewed and authenticated the works Ms. Freedman showed them as being by Diebenkorn.”

For months Knoedler has been buffeted by accusations that it failed to check sufficiently the authenticity of more than 20 paintings it promoted as the work of Modernist masters. Now, in the matter of these Diebenkorn works, Mr. Grant said that Knoedler intentionally overlooked adverse information in order to sell the two drawings, and perhaps eight others, that he says it wrongly attributed to Diebenkorn. Most of them were not shown to the family, he said.

While the gallery and Ms. Freedman deny the accusations, the art scholar who accompanied the Diebenkorn family that day in 1993 said he could confirm the family’s account. “This was a long time ago, but I can remember standing in the room at Knoedler, particularly Phyllis and I looking at them,” said the scholar, John Elderfield, a former curator at the Museum of Modern Art who still assists the family in reviewing artworks. “We did express doubt.”

Photo

A drawing said to be by Richard Diebenkorn that is in dispute.Credit
R. C. Kemper Charitable Trust

The drawings in question were two of five sold by Knoedler as Diebenkorns that came from a man who would not say where he had gotten them, Mr. Grant said. The family also disputes the authenticity of another five drawings that Knoedler sold in the 1990s as part of the Ocean Park series and were said to have come from a second source, a Madrid gallery called Vijande, now shuttered.

Knoedler and Ms. Freedman declined to discuss the Diebenkorn matter, including the provenance of the drawings or how many were sold.

Disputes have been piling up for Knoedler since it closed five months ago. Two former clients who bought paintings attributed to Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko have sued the gallery separately, saying that the works are fakes that did not pass forensic analyses they commissioned, and that they have cloudy provenances. The clients are seeking $42 million.

Those paintings and about 20 others attributed to Modernist artists were brought to the gallery by a little-known Long Island dealer, Glafira Rosales, whose transactions are now the subject of an F.B.I. investigation. Ms. Rosales has said through her lawyer that she never knowingly defrauded anyone.

Ms. Freedman has said that Ms. Rosales told her the paintings came from a previously unknown cache acquired by a secret collector in the 1950s. No paperwork from these transactions has surfaced.

Ms. Freedman has testified in court that she continues to believe the Rosales paintings are authentic. Her lawyer, Mr. Gravante, said they have spoken to experts who will back that assertion at trial.

“Just last week we received another expert opinion confirming the authenticity of those works,” he said. He declined to provide the expert’s name.

Ms. Rosales is also listed as a former owner of two of the disputed Diebenkorn drawings that Knoedler sold, according to Mr. Grant, who said he has discussed his concerns about the disputed drawings with F.B.I. officials conducting the wider inquiry. Mr. Gravante has said his client has been told she is not a target of the inquiry.

The view of Mr. Gravante, a partner in the firm of Boies, Schiller & Flexner, is that the 1995 letter is potent evidence that the Diebenkorn family never objected to the drawings’ authenticity until now. “Documents are truth tellers,” he said, adding that the Diebenkorn family had been shown only the two works in 1993, no others.

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Ann Freedman, the former president of Knoedler & Company, which closed five months ago.Credit
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

The records also show, he said, that one of the two drawings the family reviewed was sold, not by Ms. Freedman but by her predecessor at Knoedler, Lawrence Rubin.

Mr. Rubin, who remains close to the Diebenkorns, said in an interview that he does not remember being involved in such a sale, and that he never thought the drawings were authentic. “I told Phyllis Diebenkorn that I thought they were not right,” he said. “ I never believed in those drawings.”

Mr. Grant dismissed the 1995 letter as a belated attempt to misrepresent the meeting after Knoedler has already sold the two drawings. “The family was upset and offended by this letter,” he said, and consulted a lawyer but did not challenge it at the time.

“Ann knew perfectly well,” he said, “that the family was very suspicious of these and totally confused about how they could get out of the studio with nobody knowing about it.”

Linda Blumberg, the executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America, which represents galleries, said, speaking generally, that if an artist’s family expresses concerns about authenticity, a dealer should refute the charges with documentation. If the dealer does not, “it would be considered not doing due diligence,” she said.

Knoedler was Diebenkorn’s official gallery for more than 20 years, and so the family hoped the sale of the two drawings that it did not believe to be genuine represented an isolated episode, Mr. Grant said. But it decided then to begin compiling a definitive compendium of Diebenkorn’s work, known as a catalogue raisonné, and began to notice over the years that a number of other works sold as Diebenkorns by Knoedler and another dealer did not seem genuine.

One of the drawings the family took issue with was a series of blue-and-teal rectangles labeled “Untitled (Ocean Park Series) 1972.” It is listed as having come originally from the Vijande gallery in Spain and was later sold by Ms. Freedman and Knoedler to the Kemper family, which donated it to a museum the family had founded, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Mo. It hung there for years, Vanity Fair reported a few weeks ago, until the Diebenkorn estate noticed it in 2006 and told the museum of its doubts.

Margaret Keough, a museum spokeswoman, said the work is now in storage. She declined to say why or to address what the museum had done to investigate its provenance.

Some art world experts said that few people would doubt a Diebenkorn attribution by Knoedler because the gallery had represented the artist for so long.

A year after the disputed Diebenkorn was taken down, the Kemper museum received another drawing also said to be part of his Ocean Park series. But this one had a clearer provenance. It came from the private collection of Ms. Freedman and her husband, Robert. It was a gift, they said, to honor R. Crosby Kemper Jr.’s 80th birthday.

A version of this article appears in print on May 7, 2012, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Artist’s Family Says Gallery Ignored Warning of Fakes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe